#<-sapir-whorfism gone wild

[coquelicoq]

I've seen your numerous posts about French and English, so now I want to ask you what specific things about Spanish do you find fascinating or interesting? It can be anything, really

love the [β̞] sound. LOVE the cardinal vowels. i like that there's a voiceless postalveolar affricate ([tʃ], the "ch" sound) but no phonemic voiced counterpart. that's funky, i can dig it. big fan of smooshing words together like contigo or hacerlo. the upside down punctuation marks are so cool and smart and symmetrical and i don't know why we don't do that in every language. i like the orthography and how easy it is to figure out pronunciation based on spelling. spanish even uses accents to tell you when the stress is different 😩😭 can you imagine if english did that? please. i love that you can just drop the pronominal subject a lot of the time because that information is encoded in the verb and the conjugations are audibly different by person and number. very elegant. it's one of the things i love about latin too. i like the passive se construction (like in "se habla español"). immediatamente is a baller word and i find myself trying to slip it into french sentences because it's so much more fun to say than immédiatement, no offense french. i love diminutive endings like ita and ito. pobrecita/o is an amazing word, i constantly want to use it. i like that you can just use any adjective as a noun if you feel like it (french does this too, english not to the same extent). i can't explain why this was my reaction, but when i first learned the word ello (probably on like, day 1 of spanish class lol), i was like shut the fuck up. for real? that's so cool. i love how, given the o/a gender distinction, adding -e as a nonbinary ending is pretty intuitive, and i love how it suggests the existence of as-yet undiscovered approaches to gender to which -u and -i would correspond. kidding, kidding. i know it doesn't work like that. but i mean. that would be cool though.